Did Marc Dreier Get the Punishment He Deserved?

Just days before Bernard Madoff captured the nation's attention as the largest Ponzi schemer in U.S. history, Marc Dreier, a prominent Manhattan attorney, was arrested for orchestrating a massive fraud that netted over $750 million.

AP

Following his arrest, Dreier and his lead defense attorney, Gerald Shargel, spent a great deal of time trying to strike the right tone in appealing to U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff for a lighter sentence than the 145 years prosecutors wanted for conspiracy, fraud and money laundering.

This is not just for the obvious reason of shortening his prison sentence — as a 60-year-old man (now 62), Dreier stands a decent chance of dying in prison anyway. But the length of the sentence also helps determine the type of facility where convicts are sent.

In the end, though, Dreier was sentenced to serve 20 years at the Federal Correctional Institution at Sandstone, which is a low-security federal prison in Northern Minnesota. U.S. Bureau of Prisons policy generally requires that inmates with longer sentences serve their time at a higher-security facility. Madoff, for example, was sentenced a few weeks before Dreier to 150 years at a medium-security facility in North Carolina.

That said, do you think Dreier got the punishment he deserved? Vote now in our "Unraveled" poll!